Seeing God for who He is

“If my mind is the size of a soda can and God is the size of all the oceans, it would be stupid for me to say He is only the small about of water I can scoop into my little can. God is so much bigger, so far beyond our time-encased, air/food/sleep-dependant lives.”

-Francis Chan from “Crazy Love”

I think one of the things that keep me from truly trusting God and surrendering my heart is the fact that I can’t comprehend Him. My incredibly small mind cannot fathom the power of the Almighty God. I let my fear of failure and insignificance spread over into my faith. How can you step out in faith when you are afraid that His promises cannot be kept?

I feel like the analogy above fully describes me. I try to fit the majesty of a God the size of the ocean into my little soda can view of possibilities. My 12oz little piece of God. God doesn’t even exist within time. How stupid to think that just because my mind cannot comprehend His capabilities, that it should cause doubt of those capabilities.

We are programmed to trust what we can prove. What we can touch, taste, see, smell, and hear. We sometimes may allow ourselves to trust in our feelings. We rarely trust what we cannot experience with our senses and what we are afraid to feel. Faith is a tough thing. It is not for the faint of heart. God is asking us to do a huge thing by trusting Him.

But understanding whom God is and who we are not is a huge part of learning to trust Him. To see how significant He is and how insignificant we are in comparison is incredibly humbling.

But I think a huge deterrent to trusting Him is also our limited view of how much He truly loves us. We tend to just feel like God cares for us in a warm way. But we just don’t get it. HE LOVES US, like really, truly loves us. That’s a BIG deal! He loves us deeply and waits for us to love Him back. To someone who often let’s the enemy convince me I am unlovable, this is everything.

What if I lived my life like I am loved by the creator of love and life? What if the thoughts I have and decisions I make reflected this truth in my life? What if I loved as a result of being loved?

Understanding Christ’s love for us, truly acknowledging the sacrifice He made for us as being an act of love, that should change everything. Realistically, it usually doesn’t, but it should. To truly see God for whom He is; magnificent, loving, fair, completely able, these things should change everything.

But why doesn’t it? Well as usual, it comes down to a choice.

My choice usually tends to be a fear of God. Not a fear in terms that He will hurt me, but that He is not who He says He is. For me, it’s in terms that I am afraid to believe that when He says to have no fear because He makes all things right, I cower in fear anyway. Because it’s easier to be afraid than to believe, then to trust. It’s easier to believe that God cannot overcome the impossible.

I have such a bad habit of boxing God into the little realm of understanding I have. I forget that He governs all things for He is the one who created them. He can do whatever and anything He wants. How foolish to continue to fear when God has conquered all things that we may fear.

The first step to trusting the almighty, yet invisible God is to seeing Him for who He is. To acknowledge that just because we are limited by the impossible doesn’t mean He is. I want to stop being afraid and boxing God into a corner and giving Him limiting attributes isn’t going to help me do that. Only letting Him out of the box and into His rightful place will.